Random ramblings

Creative Thursday / Wednesday

I recently downloaded Creative Thursday on my Kindle (app) after reading an interesting review in Gathered (oh Gathered, you influence me far too much), I haven’t got round to reading it yet but the review summarised it quite well and I liked the idea of having one day a week to be creative. Actually I’d say I was pretty creative 7 days a week, there’s the baking of course and there is always embroidery, even though, other than a brief thing I did for Feeling Stitchy, I haven’t blogged any of my embroidery for a while, as although I have been embroidering pretty constantly, the two things I’ve been working on have been long term projects and it’ll be a while before they’re completed. (I’m very into big long term projects at the moment, they allow you to settle down and see the long view plus I’m always a bit rubbish about deciding what project to start next and preparing the materials for it, so by choosing lengthy projects the proportion of choosing / preparing is much smaller than the time spent creating). However my predilection for long term comfort projects (I also have that Suffolk Puff quilt on the go, the one I’m working on in that photo from a few days ago, that was started in February), which although are very comforting (which is after all one of the purposes of craft), it does mean I don’t get much time to try anything new. I do make clothes but that pretty much is always because of a reason, such as an event or a fancy dress thing at school and I always leave it to the last minute. Sooo I’ve decided (without reading the book, although I will) that I’m going to set aside at least an hour, every week, where I’m doing something creative which is less about the comfort and more about stretching myself a bit or learning something new, after all who knows what my next comfort craft will be unless I try it? It does always nag in the back of my mind that there is lots of stuff I want to do, I just never have time, well I’m going to make myself a little bit of the stuff. I’m doing it on Wednesday though, not Thursday.

Having not read the book (yet), I’m making this up as I go along but I’ve set myself some conditions for my Creative Wednesday

* Preparing ahead is good* It’s fine, even good to start a new project that will take a lot longer than 1 hour, you can do it on other days but you don’t have to, in fact you could always do it next Creative Wednesday
* Photography is fine, as long as it’s not an area you photograph frequently, unless you haven’t been to that area recently
* Baking is fine, as long as it’s a challenge, as would be making sweets or cordials
* Writing / coding / building / gardening / music also counts as creative
* Some new skills take a lot of time to master, so it’s fine to revisit them frequently
* You can use an old skill in a new original way
* Record ideas throughout the week, if you can’t think of anything pick something from the ideas list.

So what did I do today? I finished one of the aforementioned long term embroidery projects a few weeks ago and I want to turn the resulting pieces into a quilt of my own design. I’ve already worked out the design, when originally embroidering the pieces, I always knew they were going to go into a quilt but I had envisioned something with quite big squares and rectangles, well I did the maths and I realised that only 5cm squares would work, suddenly I had a lot more fabric cutting to do and a greater need for accuracy! Even though I’ve owned a rotary cutter etc for a while I don’t use them and consequently by patchwork tends to be on the wonky side, but I’ve taken months on these embroideries and if I do say so myself, I’m rather proud of them, so I don’t want to do wonky this time. So I dusted down my rotary cutter and reminded myself how to use it. I worked for a couple of hours and in that time only got the squares cut for one of the eight different fabrics I’m using. I’m going to be cutting for a while, but at least neater!